considering moving up to next level from imovie to FCX

I have been making movies with imovie and most people are impressed. I recently did a retirement DVD using imovie stills and adding comments, music and ken burn effects. And people thought I was a professional. But I keep reading how you can do so much more with final cut express.

How can I dazzle people at work using FCX rather than imovie? What can I do in FCX that I cant do in imovie?

Can you give me some examples. If I go to the next level, what will make it more professional?

TIA

take a look at http://apple.com/finalcut/

Thanks , that was very informative. But I also wanted feedback from someone that has used imovie and upgraded to FCX and give some concrete examples of the differences.

While Im asking questions, one important one is that I can buy from ebay FCX 2.0 for a reasonable price, is there that much difference from 2.0 to 3.0?


TIA

cooljoe815 said:

While Im asking questions, one important one is that I can buy from ebay FCX 2.0 for a reasonable price, is there that much difference from 2.0 to 3.0?

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I believe that 2.0 only runs on PPC processors. So you'll want 3.0 for the new Mac Intel you'll be buying.

The differences between FCX and iMovie are big. I've used FCP and iMovie a little bit. I'm not a pro. Anyway, in iMovie you have limited control of the audio and video by the fact you have one video track and two audio tracks. In FCP and I'm sure to FCX to a similar extent, you can have many tracks for both sources which allows you to composite facier effects and allows for more experimentation. You also gain frame level accuracy for those effects.

Purhaps someone with more experience will pipe up.

Oh. Don't buy FCX this week, as a new version of FC Suite is expected next week at the US NAB show, which gives a chance that FCX will be upgraded soon too.

very good info thanks